Accordingly, what the psychoanalytic perspective helps us appreciate (and here it supplements phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty was well aware) is the concrete (infra)empirical operation, in the life of the adult, of the first containing skin. Indeed, the origin of the skin ego, the first containing skin, in the undifferentiated, protosensory écart constitutive of the sensible entails its essential withdrawal from phenomenological manifestation. Such a withdrawal characterizes adult life first and foremost only because it is a purely general, sensible-transcendental condition of all life, of life as such.
Confronted with an artwork that expressly stages a regression from the muscular model of media consumption to some kind of (re)inhabitation of the primary skin as the core of our essential technicity, we thus have due cause to be wary, but also to be intrigued. How can a reversal of the phylogenetic trajectory of embodied life ever lead us back to that which is by definition phenomenologically inscrutable?
Describing her computer sound and video installation, Bodymaps: artifacts of touch (1996), artist Thecla Schiphorst announces her desire to create a sensory interface with the human capacity for amodal tactility, the operation of which is logically, if not per force chronologically and developmentally, prior to the differentiation of the senses (see Fig ure 1.6). Noting the work's technical infrastructure—its use of "a specially designed sensor surface ... which can detect touch, pressure, and the amount of forced applied" to it—Schiphorst explains its function:
[T]hese sensors lie beneath a white velvet surface upon which is projected images of the artist's body. The surface yearns for contact and touch. Its rule base is complex and subtle, impossible to decode. Its effect is disturbing, erotic, sensual and subjective. The intention of the work is to subvert the visual/objective relationship between the object and the eye, between click and drag, between analysis and power, to create a relationship between participant and technology that transgresses rules of ownership and objectivity and begs questions of experience, power and being.... The work ... constructs a space inhabited by the body as mediated by technology. The Bodymaps installation employs electric field sensor technology, in which the viewer's proximity, touch, and gesture evoke moving sound and image responses from the body contained and represented within the installation space. Images of the body ...of the artist ... are projected onto a horizontal planar surface. The opaque projection surface is a container for the body, and is the site and source for the physical and cultural conditions and objects or artifacts which reference this containment. The surface is covered in white velvet creating a sensual and unexpected texture which leaves “traces" of the hand prints that are left behind, creating a relationship to memory, an inability to escape the effects of one's touch. As the viewer places their [sic] hands closer to the surface or skin of the installation, a complex soundscape responds to their proximity and movement. The image shudders. The viewer becomes participant through the sense of touch. There is no escape from entering the “third space" between objective seeing and subjective feeling.... This work invites relationship through an experience grounded in proprioceptive knowledge, skin sense feeling, listening through touching, seeing through hearing, together integrated through attention.18
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